Best for Owen to deal in here and now

If Real Madrid really want to do the right thing by Michael Owen, as seems to be the consensus from their hierarchy of quotable sources, then they should forget about making a quick profit on the player and allow him to go out on a 12-month loan deal.

It is impossible to imagine Owen settling for a place even farther down the subs' bench in a World Cup season and harder still to believe Real Madrid would allow him to do so. They want to trade, quite possibly need to trade, but a combination of the asking price and the squad strength of the Premiership clubs most likely to be able to afford it has left the market looking sluggish.

With the transfer window closing in just over a fortnight, the time has come for both parties to make concessions. If Real Madrid want to make money from Owen the best time to do so would be a year from now, after a successful World Cup. No one is guaranteed a successful World Cup, but Owen is more or less guaranteed not to have one if he spends this season as a spectator. Surely Real Madrid, of all people, could afford to wait a year and gamble on their investment growing in value. This is the club that took a punt on Jonathan Woodgate, after all.

Owen, for his part, might have to accept a temporary solution to his immediate dilemma. His class is not in doubt, his attitude is exemplary, but his Champions League ambitions could be getting in the way. Owen must be heartily sick of hearing about the paradox of his position, with the European Cup now permanently on the Anfield sideboard while he inches ever closer to the exit door at the Bernabeu. He must deal with the present reality, however, and he only needs to pick up the papers to realise that English clubs in the Champions League bracket are not exactly falling over themselves in the scramble for his signature.

What Owen needs to do now is back his own ability as bravely as he did when moving to Spain. The most important thing is to play, which means joining a club where he would be welcomed as a first-choice striker and not regarded as back-up or used as a specialist substitute. There are still about 16 of them in the Premiership and, while every option from Newcastle to Wigan could be dismissed out of hand as a step down from Real Madrid, a 12-month loan might suit everyone.

An added bonus to Owen turning up at Aston Villa or Manchester City would be to get Sven-Goran Eriksson on the road again. The striker could lead the fightback for clubs and spectators concerned at the unhealthy concentration of almost all England's leading players at the top four teams. At the moment Eriksson could do virtually all his scouting by watching Chelsea, Manchester United and Liverpool, with occasional visits to Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur. Even then, he seems unlikely to see much of players such as Joe Cole, Shaun Wright-Phillips and Peter Crouch unless he can find a way to watch the reserves. With Blackburn turning Welsh, Bolton turning Japanese and Jermaine Jenas threatening to turn his back on Newcastle, the only attraction for Sven in the whole of the frozen north could soon be Stewart Downing at Middlesbrough.

Worse, all those cosy trips to his beloved Madrid will be numbered once Owen joins Woodgate on the non-playing list. Not much point in going all that way just to see David Beckham, is there? Not when you always pick him anyway, regardless of the way he has been playing.

Eriksson is going to spend most of the season stuck in the capital, which will probably suit in what could be his last year in England. The idea that he ever used to tour all 20 Premiership grounds in search of undiscovered gems such as Chris Powell is something of a myth in any case. There was a slightly scattergun approach to the first friendly, when Eriksson was understandably unfamiliar with the resources at his disposal, but for his first competitive game, against Finland at Anfield in March 2001, he used 14 players drawn from seven clubs. In his most recent competitive match, the victory over Azerbaijan at Newcastle this year, Eriksson also used 14 players from seven clubs.

The big difference is that while Manchester United (5) and Liverpool (4) supplied nine of the players in 2001, this year their joint contribution was down to four. Steven Gerrard was Liverpool's sole representative, and back in March even he was mulling over a possible move to Chelsea. The surprise London newcomers are not Chelsea but Spurs - each club provided three players for the last international - but Chelsea are the worry because they are currently bringing to the Premiership Real Madrid's bad habit of stockpiling international players in the reserves.

So Owen needs to think carefully about frying pans and fires before making his leap for freedom. The obvious move was not the right move last time and the right move may not be the obvious one now. The best move Owen could make is one that helps him make a success of the World Cup. Get that right and Real Madrid might find they like him after all.

Football: it's just not cricket

Might as well admit now, since any number of normally reticent football-haters are popping up to shout the odds from the safety of Freddie Flintoff's aura of greatness, that nothing in the next nine months of overhyped, overpaid bladder-chasing is likely to be as gripping, as heroic or as memorable as the denouement of the Edgbaston Test match.

Flintoff and Brett Lee fought each other magnificently and when victor congratulated vanquished after a brave effort had to end just two runs short of the target, it provided one of the most noble images of this or any other summer. Some leading commentators none the less managed to miss the gesture at the time and had to retrospectively gush on about its significance two or three days after the event, but most television viewers could see for themselves that cricket at the highest level has a gladiatorial dimension that is absent from many other team sports, football among them.

It is a while since anything even resembling nobility attached itself to football, what with bomb chants at Hull, provocative stalling over £100,000-per-week contracts and fights erupting between players and supporters on pre-season tours. So by all means, cricket fans, go ahead and feel superior. But don't run away with the idea that cricket deserves to be more popular than football, because that would be its ruin. If all the fans and the fame and the television money and the agents flocked to cricket, how long do you think even the illusion of a whiter-than-white sport would last?

Those who sneer at football's manners and mores tend to forget that the game is not intrinsically flawed; all its perceived faults derive from its popularity. Football is the way it is because we have made it so. Like it or not, the national game is a pretty fair reflection of the nation.

At its best, as can currently be seen, cricket works wonderfully well as a contest and a test of character and can even fill in as a metaphor for Englishness. We like to think that is how others see us. Except they don't, of course. Other countries call us the 'fuck-offs', and usually picture Englishness as something overweight, over-lagered and over-loud in a football shirt. Never mind which is the true picture, just ask yourself which is likely to be the truer picture. Cricket might be the sport we occasionally aspire to in this country, but football is what we do.